Person:

Shavell, Steven

When would an individual expect that adherence to the law would advance the social good? This time-honored question is not only of theoretical interest; it also holds practical importance to the degree that individuals wish to further social well-being. In the stylized model on which I focus, an individual’s knowledge of factors relevant to social welfare is inferior to that of lawmakers in some respects and is superior in others. Thus, in assessing whether obeying a legal rule would promote social welfare, an individual must take into rational account not only that the rule will impound certain superior information of lawmakers, but also that the rule will often fail to reflect his or her private information. A second issue that an individual must consider in deciding whether following the law would be socially desirable is a compliance externality: the potential influence of the witnessing of his or her compliance behavior on the compliance behavior of observers. The conclusions from the model of socially desirable conformance to the law are interpreted, including their implications for the moral obligation to obey the law.

Overly strict legal standards are commonly thought to discourage parties from engaging in socially desirable activities. It is explained here, however, that excessive legal standards cannot lead to undesirable curtailment of activities when legal standards are enforced by liability for negligence, essentially because parties can choose to be negligent rather than comply. But excessive legal standards can lead to undesirable reduction of activities when adherence to the standards is required by the regulatory system.

Discretion is examined as a feature of the design of rule-guided systems. That is, given that rules have to be administered by some group of persons, called adjudicators, and given that their goals may be different from society's (or a relevant organization's), when is it socially desirable to allocate discretionary authority to the adjudicators and, if so, to what extent? The answer reflects a tradeoff between the informational advantage of discretion—that adjudicators can act on information not included in rules—and the disadvantage of discretion—that decisions may deviate from the desirable because adjudicators' objectives are different from society's. The control of discretion through limitation of its scope, through decision-based payments to adjudicators, and through the appeals process, is also considered.

When, and why, might it be thought immoral to commit a breach of contract? The answer to this fundamental question is not obvious, because, as is stressed, and as has been overlooked in addressing the question, contracts do not usually provide explicitly for the particular events that are observed to occur. When a contract does not expressly address a contingency that occurs, the morality of breach is assumed here to depend on what the contract would have said had it addressed the contingency. This assumption is explained to imply that breach is not immoral if expectation damages would have to be paid for breach, but that breach might be immoral if damages are less than the true expectation, as is probable. This conclusion is related to the results of a survey that was conducted of individuals' attitudes toward the morality of breach. The conclusion is also related to the views of commentators on the morality of breach and of those on the "efficiency" of breach.

The major theme of this article is that the interpretation of contracts is in the interests of contracting parties. The general reasons are (a) that interpretation may improve on otherwise imperfect contracts; and (b) that the prospect of interpretation allows parties to write simpler contracts and thus to conserve on contracting effort. A method of interpretation is defined as a function whose argument is the written contract and whose value is another contract, the interpreted contract, which is what actually governs the parties' joint enterprise. It is shown that interpretation is superior to enforcement of contracts as written, and the optimal method of interpretation is analyzed.

This article develops the point that incentive and risk‐bearing problems associated with contractual holdup may justify legal intervention. Contractual holdup is considered both for fresh contracts and for modifications of contracts. One type of legal intervention is flat voiding of contracts. Such intervention tends to be advantageous when holdup situations are engineered. Another type of intervention is price‐conditioned voiding of contracts—voiding only if the price is excessive. This policy tends to be advantageous when contracts are socially desirable (bad weather puts a ship in jeopardy and it needs rescue). Price‐conditioned voiding prevents the imposition of holdup prices but still allows contracts (to tow ships in distress) to be made. Both types of legal intervention in contracts and their modifications are employed by courts to counter problems of pronounced holdup. In addition, various price control regulations appear partly to serve the same objective.

The appeals process—whereby litigants can have decisions of adjudicators reviewed by a higher authority—is a general feature of formal legal systems (and of many private decision‐making procedures). The appeals process leads to the making of better decisions because it constitutes a threat to adjudicators whose decisions would deviate too much from socially desirable ones. Further, it yields this benefit without absorbing resources to the extent that adjudicators can anticipate when appeals would occur and would want to make decisions to forestall the actual occurrence of appeals.

In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon accident and the BP oil spill, the government imposed a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The issue addressed here is whether, on grounds of policy, BP should be held responsible for moratorium-related economic losses. The answer that is developed is no. The reason, in essence, is that, although the spill caused the moratorium, the moratorium might be viewed as a socially beneficial event on net because its purpose was to avert a significant danger.

In The Uneasy Case for Product Liability, we maintained that the benefits of product liability are likely to be less than its costs for many products, especially widely sold ones. Our article was intended to alter the dominant view held by the judiciary and commentators that product liability has a clear justification on grounds of public policy. We argued instead that a skeptical attitude toward product liability should be adopted.

Professors John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky strongly criticize our article in The Easy Case for Products Liability Law: A Response to Professors Polinsky and Shavell. To a significant extent, however, they attack a straw man, for they impute to us a radical thesis – that product liability should be eliminated for all widely sold products – that we manifestly did not advance. In fact, we argued that whether product liability is undesirable depends on the particular product. Goldberg and Zipursky also ascribe to us other opinions that exaggerate what we said in our article – notably, they state that we believe that product liability has no beneficial effect on product safety for widely sold products. It is not surprising, therefore, that they are unable to support these mischaracterizations with citations to statements in our article.

The major claim that Goldberg and Zipursky develop is that our benefit-cost analysis fails to demonstrate that the case for product liability is uneasy. In our view, their critique is deficient on multiple accounts, including that it contains numerous distortions and errors, and hence does not alter our original conclusion.